Senators on Trial

Published: March 4, 1982

The Senate majority leader, Howard Baker, has stationed guards at the doors of the Senate chamber and strongly encouraged attendance and close attention to the floor debate that began yesterday. He's determined that his colleagues consider carefully the resolution to expel Senator Harrison Williams of New Jersey, convicted of bribery in the Abscam investigation.

In the light of efforts by some senators to bargain for censure rather than expulsion, the forced intimacy may do more than emphasize the gravity of the occasion. It will require the senators to examine not only their embattled colleague Pete Williams, but themselves.

They should not find much reason for pride in what they see. Like their House counterparts, senators have been loath to hold each other to any ethical standard higher than the criminal law. They have indulged Mr. Williams's every request for delay, at increasing cost to their own reputations.

After their friend was indicted, they waited for the trial. After his conviction, they were content to await motions for acquittal. And now, even after he has been sentenced to three years in prison and a

$50,000 fine, some want to postpone action until all the appeals are exhausted. Why? Mr. Williams no longer enjoys the presumption of innocence. A jury had no reasonable doubt that he offered his office - and his standing with his Senate peers - for private influence and profit. The defendant still protests he was set up by a Government informant to brag about his legislative clout as part of the deception. But that explanation didn't sway the jury and it insults the Senate's intelligence.

Indeed, Mr. Williams's effort to put the F.B.I.'s Abscam investigation on trial is a desperation tactic that only confuses the main issue. Of course there must be inquiry into the deception and undercover techniques that caught half a dozen members of Congress. But that is no substitute for the inevitable judgment the Senate must make on Senator Williams's fitness.

Fear that a hostile executive can attack and subdue a legislature may be warranted. But the best Congressional defense against that is to maintain its own high standard of ethics. It is Congress's failure to keep its own house clean that invites outside scrutiny. What the Senate does in this case will demonstrate not only what it thinks of Pete Williams, but whether it has any respect for itself.